Monday, March 17, 2014

Arduino–Day 5: 7 Segment Displays – A side quest

My shopping list had a Microtivity 7 segment LED display, which I couldn’t wait to figure out how to light up. Unfortunately, I was (and still am) no good at reading the schematics.

My policy is to figure out stuff by myself (so I wouldn’t be running to Google for every little thing). My first objective was to light it up. So, It’s trial & error all the way.

I didn’t want Arduino to drive & display arbitrary numbers just yet. (I knew that was easy :-). Harder to figure out how to take less pins to drive single / multiple digits).

To cut the long story short:

I figured out 3, 8 there were actually Ground! It was a matter of connecting the ground to 3 & 8 (Ok, I figured out 1 ground either 3 / 8 was enough to complete the circuit). Pin 1 starts left lower corner (as in the diagram above) and goes anti-clockwise to 10.

All 10 Pins

1

2

4

5

6

7

9

10

I connected the GRD to Pin 3.

Luckily, the first display I tried worked. In the second one, the middle bar won’t light up. And one of the bars (Pin 10), only weakly glows. The rest of them (I had bought the pack of 4) works though. Returned via Amazon Locker!